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Let me give my opinon of one, "The Secret Book of John".I think the validity of the Secret Book of John is questionable. Why?

A. The book is only as valid as the Bible (The Scripture.. "Old Testemant", and The New Testemant) isB. The author, John, could have been ANY John, and not nessecarily the Apostle John

In the book I have, which has The Secret Book of John, it lists differnt parts of the Old Testemant where differnt parts of it came from. This could add to the validity by prooving somewhat that the things stated in the Secret Book of John have some basis. But, this could also mean that the author just scoured the Scripture for different statments from the scripture to add a false sense of reality to the implications of the book.

--------------------"Sex is like a gun.. you aim, you shoot, you run" - Aerosmith

You might come to a conclusion if you first read Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels' 'The Gnostic Gospels,' as a now-classic intro, and then 'The Gnostic Paul.' She has been a most helpful teacher in the study of Gnostic religion.

I first was introduced to Gnosticism by Elain Pagels, who's already been mentioned. She makes a good case for their authenticity. When it comes down to it though, it's not really important, at least to me, whether they're 'real' or not. They have great things to teach one way or another. It's remarkably similar to Buddhism, except that the pantheon of gods is just more interesting for me.

I remember on my first bad acid trip I left my body and ascended into the universe. I saw the Demiurge and all His servants hovering about the Earth, desperately and angrily trying to keep us stupid. I then moved farther and farther away from the earth until I saw the Totality of the cosmos, with the True Creator blissfully lording over the whole of creation. I swear at that time I could actually see the universe in more than the three physical dimensions, as it truly is.

The teachings of Jesus that are most personal to me are the following: --We are in Hell. This plane of existance is the lowest, grossest, farthest removed from God. It doesn't get any worse than life on earth. 'We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the fuckin universe.'--Yahweh is an idiot. The god of the Old Testament is actually The Demiurge or The Blind God (what was his name? Samael?). He doesn't know that there are other realms above this one. He was the creation of Sophia, the principle of wisdom and enlightenment who once upon a time either possessed the body of a Jewish carpenter named Jesus or else condensed the ethereal form into the semblance of a physical body, depending upon who you talk to. Sophia, as it turns out, is herself a daughter of the True Creator, whose name I don't remember. Nothing is really known about this guy because he's just so far removed from our existance. It's not possible for the lowly human mind to even begin to comprehend this entity. --Enlightenment comes from within. This is one of the main reasons Gnosticism was stamped out by the Catholic Church around 200 CE. If we can all have divine revelations, we don't need a clergy and we don't need to give our money to an organization in order to go to Heaven.

It's been a while since I really read up on the cosmology, so I might be wrong here or there, but that's the basic jist of it, as far as I'm concerned. There are lots of other Important points Gnosticism makes, but these three are my favorite. --m

--------------------(the above was deciphered from phi (~1.62) using an advanced alphanumeric conversion algorhythm and should not be perceived as meaningful.)

A pretty good summary of major Gnostic themes. I do not adhere to the notion of the Demiurge inasmuch as it was a not-so-veiled doctrine of antisemitism. Marcion the Gnostic wanted to do away with the entire OT. Valentinus' entire creation myth, from which your summary derives, is an alternative mythos far removed from the Hebrew-Babylonian (Gilgamesh epic) sources. Y'shua, AKA Isso, AKA Jesus (Hebrew-Aramaic-Greek) was a real human being, belonging to a Hebrew lineage. Whatever His ontological status is, He is connected to the Old Testament in an integral way, and cannot be legitimately distilled out.

A much greater antisemitic force - Nazism - attempted to do this via Hegelian metaphysics. The theology of the Lutheran Church was targeted to [bracket] the eternal Christ out from a Jewish man - split the existential (human) and ontological (Divine) natures. This of course was only an intermediarry step in the replacement of the cross with the swastika.

The recognition that genuine religious experience can come from within the believer is definately a Gnostic stance, and one that I hold in a defining way. The external institution of Sacramental theology, controlled by a priesthood who claims the power to excommunicate heretics, thereby damning individuals, is as most here agree, nothing more than terror-tactics and tyranny. The movie 'Stigmata' was an overly dramatic version of this threat to Catholicism (in particular) with regard to the Gospel of Thomas. The once-popular 'Celestine Prophesy' was a sort of take-off on this theme as well. The real Demiurge today is not 'the blind god' Samael, but the same false god of the New Testament, ''Mammon," or money. Rudolf Steiner identified Greed with the devil Ahriman. It may be an Aristotelian 'efficient cause' of change in this world, but it is regarded as 'Absolute cause' - as God - when of course it is simple idolatry.